There was no switch in the 1960s making Republicans the racist party

Letting the losers in a war write the history causes fake histories, such as the one claiming that a 1960s switch turned Republicans into the racist party.

In the context of world affairs, victory doesn’t always belong to the side that won the actual battles; it really rests with the side that writes the history. Viewed in that light, the last shot fired in the Civil War didn’t take place on the battlefield. Instead, it took place in 1936, when Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind hit the shelves.

GWTW took the South’s mythology and nationalized it. The epic 1939 movie was a force multiplier. Suddenly, the South, rather than being the losing side in a war fought primarily to end slavery, a foul institution in its own right and one made especially awful in America because it betrayed the promises in America’s founding documents, was a romantic entity, built upon unending charm and graciousness. Moreover, thanks to Margaret Mitchell, readers were well-schooled in two facts that perpetuated black subordination: (a) good slaves loved their masters and (b) bad slaves were evil and/or stupid.

The hold that Margaret Mitchell’s dynamic, romantic, fascinating narrative had on the popular consciousness probably started weakening during WWII, when Americans outside of the South got to see blacks in action, in factories and on battlefields. Truman’s executive order integrating the military, causing black and white troops to serve side by side further educated white Americans about their black fellow citizens.

The final rewrite was the Civil Rights movement. Thanks to television, Northern whites got to see a different side of blacks. They were no longer Margaret Mitchell’s plaster saints, grateful for the chance to serve their white masters or Topsy-esque fools. Instead, they were people of immense dignity, led by a man of God whose words burned themselves into American souls.

People understand the outlines of the Civil Rights, but too many do not know that, in the 1950s, it was the Republican party that drove that train. And it was the Democrat party that fought tooth-and-nail against any effort to remove the legal and social impediments imposed upon blacks, mostly in the South, but also throughout America.

This political division was unsurprising to people at the time. The history of the Democrats from their founding to the Civil Rights movement was as a slavery party, dedicated entirely to ensuring that blacks remained subordinate in America. It was open and proud about its status as the racist party. Meanwhile, the Republicans came into being as an abolitionist party, with Abraham Lincoln becoming their first standard-bearer.

Why then, are Republicans tarred as the racist party today? After all, Republicans won the Civil War, freeing blacks from slavery, and the Civil Rights war, freeing blacks from Jim Crow and the myriad other discriminatory laws in America. Shouldn’t they be viewed as the non-racist party?

The answer to that question lies in the concept with which I opened this essay: Victory doesn’t always belong to the side that won the actual battles; it really rests with the side the writes history.

Today, with their successful takeover of education from kindergarten through college and their dominance in the worlds of both news and entertainment, Democrats have been rewriting the history of the Civil Rights movement and its aftermath for more than 50 years. In this retelling, the moment the Civil Rights movement came along, even as northern Republicans fought for equal rights for blacks, the entire South switched its party affiliation from Democrat to Republican, turning the Republicans into the racist party.

I grew up hearing that story in school, and I therefore grew up believing that story. The problem is that it really is just a story, one without any relationship to facts. In the latest Prager U video, Carol Swain explains just how big that Big Lie really is:

The truth is that the Democrats, since their inception, have been the racist party. When slavery failed, they switched to Jim Crow. And when Jim Crow failed, they switched to making blacks dependent on the government, creating a perpetual plantation with reliable black votes.

Democrats achieved this conceptual victory by forcing a false paradigm on blacks and combining that paradigm with welfare incentives. The paradigm is that, because slaves had to work for white people, all work that involves interactions with white people is slavery. If you believe in that paradigm, the logical response is to quit work and take welfare, in effect turning the whites into slaves who work for you.

I find the Black Lives Matter movement utterly reprehensible, because its worst effects will always fall on the helpless people within black communities. Once you drive out the police, which the movement is doing in communities across America, you create a vacuum that sucks in the predators. And while only a small percentage of police are dangerous, all predators are dangerous.

However, to the extent that the Black Lives Matter movement is hostile to everything in America society, it’s finally creating a cadre of blacks who are no longer willing to be beholden to Democrats. In the long run, that’s a good thing. In the short run, of course, BLM is anarchy.

One other thing: Unlike most conservatives, I’m actually okay with the push across the South to get rid of Confederate monuments. Their existence reflects the fact that, despite losing the war, the end of Reconstruction left the American south free to control history (which, as I said, happened on steroids with GWTW).

To understand what I mean, imagine that the Americans unconditionally pulled out of Germany in 1950. The moment they left, the Germans, while avoiding genocide, reinstated all the anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s. Moreover, they erected monuments all over the place celebrating Hitler, Rommel, the SS, and the Gestapo. As a Jew, even if the anti-Jewish laws were gone, I would be irremediably hostile to those monuments. Likewise, if I were a black in the South, even with the Jim Crow laws gone, I would hate seeing statues of men such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the most brutal Confederate generals and a KKK founder.

A couple of other minor points that I’m throwing in, since they’re vaguely apropos: First, my own short journey into the South a couple of summers ago left me believing that, at least in Virginia, there’s more racial integration than I’ve ever seen in America’s West or North. Second, GWTW is a spectacular novel. Taken strictly on those terms, it’s one of the best American books ever written. But there’s no escaping that it is a piece of Southern propaganda, representing the last battle in the Civil War, and that it needs to be understood as such.

“And when Jim Crow failed, they switched to making blacks dependent on the government, creating a perpetual plantation with reliable black votes”….I doubt that this was the explicit intent of *most* Democrats supporting the ‘Great Society’ (although it may have been a big part of LBJ’s motivation, given some of his comments)…more likely, it was a failure to properly understand the effect of incentives. It’s quite frequent for people to design incentive systems that create behavior they were not expecting; a recent example is Wells Fargo, whose sales bonus system had the effect of creating behavior that was both illegal and unprofitable.

ymarsakar

Foster, that theory sounds more plausible if you discount conspiracy theories like HRC deleting emails and IRS targeting Americans and the existence of the Deep State.

Everything they ever told you about American history was a lie, a misrepresentation, or only part of the truth. Which includes lewrockwell, the Confederate records, and the Union records.

David Foster

Do you really think *all of them*…all the Congressmen who voted for Great Society programs, all the senior bureaucrats who implemented it, all the academics who supported it…do you really think *all of them* had a conscious intent to create a permanent dependent class?

ymarsakar

The answer to that lies in this question: Do you really think everyone working on the Manhattan Project, including the Vice President and others who weren’t working on it, knew exactly what the ultimate end goal was and what all the disinformation campaigns were for?

The techniques for control has matured greatly since Slavery 1.0 or 2.0. Check out the Federal Reserve and who owns it.

derfelcadarn

Please go to LewRockwell.com and read Fred Reeds July 22 2017 Fun with Slavery article and then tell how wonderful the north was in starting the War of Northern Aggression. Everything you were told in school was a lie.

ymarsakar

Most of what LewRockwell got from Libertarians and Southerners was the lie the Demoncrats told their ancestors. They swallowed that hook, line, and sinker, same way when Democrats voted in Hussein their new Messiah.

The idea that it was the North that fired on Fort Sumter, is the propaganda Democrats told the Irish/Scot white boys so that somebody other than the plantation owners would be doing the fighting, dying, and suffering, while the slave lords won the war and got the loot. Didn’t turn out the way they planned it.

The slave lords, minus their plantations now due to Sherman and Lincoln, got back together again, formed the KKK, which Robert Byrd is a perfect example of that Great Virginian like Derf who also thinks it was the War of “Northern Aggression”. As if taking over a union fort and killing people in it, was the North aggressing. “But Lincoln told the governors of the South that he would send relief supplies, so we had kill em all”.

As retarded a logic as the one they used for Sumner.

Wolf Howling

I’ve read it. Most of the facts he has there are correct. The situation was far more complex than is often portrayed. But he states no conclusion that I could find other than that all of the facts aren’t universally known. I don’t think that what is taught in schools is so general as to be false by omission, but I do think that it is far too general on which to make moral judgments that go beyond the historical time and place. Eh, I feel no white guilt. What did you see as his conclusions regarding, one, slavery and two, slavery and the Civil War?

Arbitrary turn-back cmd

when designing a motivational strategy, one must always consider that there are always some driven only by what is good for me. a number of these are now bureaucrats in charge in Washington, DC. I see progressive behavior towards conservatives as being defined by envy.

ymarsakar

I don’t even have to write anything any more, Book has got it. Oh, of course I still got little bits of secrets I found out about Southern Plantation life in 1830, especially vis a vis what else was going on at the time.

I would hate seeing statues of men such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the most brutal Confederate generals and a KKK founder.

Oo, I found something in need of correction. Nope, Bedford Forrest was really a good guy, just like Lee, and often argued for toleration of blacks, black citizens, and Republican governors. His KKK was more like Joseph Smith’s Freemasonry or Washington’s Freemasonry, vs the Freemasonry of the assassin club (that killed Lincoln for example).

Ymar would be unlikely to praise a Confederate general that is a Democrat, without good cause. And that lies in the real His Story, vs the story they told you. (What I said about Nixon has also become semi prophetic given what is going on with Trum)

J K Brown

Practitioners don’t write; they do. Birds fly and those who lecture them are the ones who write their story. So it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

ymarsakar

People still think they have “translated” Egyptian hiero.

Zachriel

ymarsakar: People still think they have “translated” Egyptian hiero.

They have. Hieroglyphics are a phonetic representation of spoken Egyptian, an Afroasiatic language, which survived as Coptic until the 17th century.

ymarsakar

They think they have, the way Zombies like Z think O care didn’t have death panels and Hussein was their Messiah. Humans and zombies think a lot of foolish things that they claim is righteous, but ends up being evil.

Next thing out of Z might as well be “We Say What Difference Does it Make?”

Zachriel

ymarsakar: They think they have

They know they have because hieroglyphics are largely a phonetic alphabet that represents a known, but extinct, spoken language.

It started with the cartouche for the spoken names of pharaohs; Ramesses, Thutmose, and Cleopatra.

Humans know it so well they think the Great Pyramid of Giza was built by a pharoah because of some graffiti.

And they think Native Americans came from Asia through the land bridge during an ice age, rather than Trans Atlantic colonies.

Humans, and I say that with a fair bit of conservative benefit of the doubt, like you Z, always think they know stuff that turns out to be wrong.

Zachriel

ymarsakar: The idea that a language that reads right to left, is phonetic, is like thinking Kanji is phonetic.

If you mean Egyptian hieroglyphs include logograms, sure. English includes logograms too! However, hieroglyphs are primarily a phonetic representation of a known language group, as you can easily see by looking at the various cartouches for pharaohs whose names we know from other sources. So yes, people can read Egyptian hieroglyphs.

David Foster

A good source on the realities of plantation life can be found in the journals of Fanny Kemble, a noted English actress who married an American and lives with him on his Georgia plantation. I just put up a post consolidating several previous posts about this very interesting woman:

A good assessment of life in the South comes from this from Gen. Sherman when he was commandant of what is now LSU.

Memoirs of General William T. Sherman, Vol I

pg 177

Then said [Governor of Louisiana] Moore : ” Give us your own views of daily life you see it here and throughout the South.”

I answered in effect that the people of Louisiana were hardly responsible for slavery, as they had inherited it ; that I found two distinct conditions of slavery, domestic and field hands. The domestic slaves, employed by the families, were probably better treated than any slaves on earth; but the condition of the field-hands was different, depending more on the temper and disposition of their masters and overseers than were those employed about the house;” and I went on to say that, “were I a citizen of Louisiana, and a member of the Legislature, I would deem it wise to bring the legal condition of the slaves more near the status of human beings under all Christian and civilized governments. In the first place, I argued that, in sales of slaves made by the State, I would forbid the separation of families, letting the father, mother, and children, be sold together to one person, instead of each to the highest bidder. And, again, I would advise the repeal of the statute which enacted a severe penalty for even the owner to teach his slave to read and write, because that actually qualified properly and took away a part of its value ; illustrating the assertion by the case of Henry Sampson, who had been the slave of Colonel Chambers, of Rapides Parish, who had gone to California as the servant of an officer of the army, and who was afterward employed by me in the bank at San Francisco. At first he could not write or read, and I could only afford to pay him one hundred dollars a month ; but he was taught to read and write by Reilley, our bank-teller, when his services became worth two hundred and fifty dollars a month, which enabled him to buy his own freedom and that of his brother and his family.”

What I said was listened to by all with the most profound attention ; and, when I was through, some one (I think it was Hr. Hyams) struck the table with his fist, making the glasses jingle, and said, ” By God, he is right I ” and at once he took up the debate, which went on, for an hour or more, on both sides with ability and fairness. Of course, I was glad to be thus relieved, because at the time all men in Louisiana were dreadfully excited on questions affecting their slaves, who constituted the bulk of their wealth, and without whom they honestly believed that sugar, cotton and rice, could not possibly be cultivated.

ymarsakar

The reason why they couldn’t allow slaves to read was because of the Southern vs Northern Baptist issue.

If slaves could become Christians, then the Southern Baptist theology would crack and lose political and economic force; force which was needed by the slave lords to control the Irish and Scottish clans.

and without whom they honestly believed that sugar, cotton and rice, could not possibly be cultivated.

Welfare for the slaves and welfare for the slave lords and welfare for the families of the enforcers.

It all ties in together. Political. Economic. Spiritual. Totalitarian. All for the state, nothing against the State, all inside the State, nothing outside the State. It is xenophobia, and Jehovah was right to crush the wicked with the wicked.

Tonestaple

I have a copy of “Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation” which I spent a largish amount of money on when it was first published by some university press 15 or 20 years ago. It’s nothing short of fascinating, and I will surely check out what’s on Gutenberg to read more.

J K Brown

The only caveat I would put on the monuments is the keep those established before 1910. Most of those were part of reconciliation between vets on both sides. Those put up for the 50th and especially for the centennial anniversary had different motivations.

That said, my playground was Civil War battlefields, Chickamauga most prominent. Frequently we visited the monuments around Chattanooga. I always wondered why all the monuments were to Northern regiments and none for the Confederates, although there was a Confederate cemetery. I didn’t see my first monument to the Confederates until 25 and I happened up on it in Norfolk, VA.

But granted, no one really told the story that the battles for Chattanooga were considered liberation of East Tennessee by Gen. Grant rather than conquest, similarly with the north Georgia counties that had been occupied by GA militia to prevent their secession back to the Union. I’ve even seen a report that they discovered documents indicating that the GA vote to secede was fixed and actually didn’t pass.

ymarsakar

Of course it was fixed. They had been planned secession for awhile. Not even their military leaders like Lee, knew about it ahead of time. Things went a little too well once the trigger was pulled. They were prepared, no matter what happened.

Zachriel

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni**er”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.

— Lee Atwater, Republican Party strategist

ymarsakar

Z says he is an angel and not a fallen one or a demon. Except when you notice he starts using “we” when I press the Zombie, they end up crucifying themselves by their own words as per Legion.

As Leftist necromancers love to do, they love bringing up dead sock puppets like Reagan or some other Dear Leader of yours, and crucifying you with your own supposed leader’s words. Except it’s often quoted out of context, the leader is “dead”, so the Demoncrats can make them vote Demoncrat or anything else for that matter, and there’s nobody around to refute their claims, especially not Reagan or Bush II.

In such a fashion did Leftists like Z use the US Constitution to institute Gaystapo marriage and many Americans swallowed the CON, as usual.

Zachriel

Notably, you ignored the substance of our comment.

ymarsakar

Ignoring Legion is usually one of my perks.

Zachriel

But you didn’t ignore “Legion”, you ignored the *substance* of our comment.

Having gone through the entire tape, that bit you have culled 1) runs counter to everything Atwater said; and 2) is missing the context of both the question and Atwater’s sentence immediately succeeding the quote you have made. Atwater spent virtually the entire interview stating that race was no longer the issue in the South — to an extent that surprised even Atwater. And further, as he noted:

“My generation will be the first generation of southerners that won’t be prejudiced . . .”

Q: But might there–I’m not saying that he does this consciously–but the fact is that he does get to the Wallace voter, and to the racist side of the Wallace voter, by doing away with legal services, by doing away with, cutting down on food stamps–

At this point, Atwater interrupted and gave his famous answer, portions of which have been widely quoted. Let’s parse it:

A: Here’s how I would approach that issue as a statistician, a political scientist–or no, as a psychologist, which I am not, is how abstract you handle the race thing.

It is not clear what Atwater meant by “abstract” here. In the context of everything else he has said about Southern politics, and about the fact that in 1980 the issues that dominated elsewhere–the economy and national defense–also dominated in the South, I think he meant something like “universal.” In other words, are appeals to white Southerners specifically based on race, in a way that historically would not have been attempted in other regions, or are they based on the same issues, promoted in the same language, as elsewhere in the U.S.?

In other words you start out in — now y’all don’t quote me on this–

Atwater apparently said “don’t quote me on this” because he was about to use the word “nigger.” Lamis quoted him anyway.

…you start out in 1954 by saying nigger, nigger, nigger. By 1968 you can’t say nigger, that hurts, there’s a backlash, so you say stuff like forced busing, states rights and all that stuff. And you’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all of these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it, I’m not saying it.

This last statement is key, but is never quoted by liberals. Atwater has already said several times during the interview that race is no longer a significant element in Southern politics. Here, he specifically disclaims agreement with the proposition that Reagan’s policy positions contained a subconscious appeal to racial prejudice. That was Professor Lamis’s suggestion, not his. But he goes on to make the argument that even if some voters draw a subconscious connection between, say, cutting the food stamp program and race, the absence of any specifically racial appeal shows what a minor factor race has become in Southern politics:

But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded, then we’re doing away with the racial problem one way or another. You follow me? ‘Cause obviously sitting around saying, we want to cut taxes, we want to cut this, and we want–is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than nigger, nigger. So any way you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.

Liberals like Martin Bashir cite this interview for the proposition that Republicans skillfully conceal appeals to racism in seemingly innocuous policy discussions. Obviously, Atwater said nothing of the sort. And he declined to agree with Professor Lamis’s suggestion that Reagan’s talk about cutting programs like legal services and food stamps “gets to” the racist side of the George Wallace voter, albeit unconsciously. “I’m not saying it.” What Atwater did say, repeatedly and unambiguously, is that racial prejudice no longer plays a significant role in Southern elections, and that Reagan won the South in 1980 on the same issues with which he swept the rest of the country: the economy and national defense. It requires a great deal of dishonesty to twist Atwater’s words into the exact opposite of what he actually said.

Zachriel

“Now you talk about cutting taxes and these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that’s part of it.” Atwater justified this by thinking it would lead to the end of the race problem, but that’s clearly not what happened. Dog-whistles are just as much a part of modern politics as when Atwater was busy.

Atwater eventually realized his error and repented, by the way.

Zachriel

Wolf Howling: Lamis quoted him anyway.

Minor point: Lamis didn’t attribute the quote to Atwater by name until after Atwater’s death. The audio was not released until after Lamis’s death.

ymarsakar

Not unexpected given the record here.

Wolf Howling

The video leaves out an important point. In the early 60’s, the leader of the nascent conservative movement was Barry Goldwater. He opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act on grounds of federalism. He was probably right on the law, but 180 degrees of wrong on the politics of the moment. That was when LBJ said “I’ll have the niggers voting Democrat for 200 years.”

The other thing that the video leaves out is that it was not the larger Democrat Party who captured the civil rights movement, it was the radical socialist movement – the progs – who captured it and have run with it ever since, grafting race and sex onto Marx’s paradigm of oppressed socio-economic classes. The Democrat party, LBJ being exhibit 1, embraced the progs for the votes, and now, today, the progs own the Democrat Party. There is nothing left of the old party. That itself would not be a bad thing, but what has replaced it is infinitely worse. Neither JFK nor Harry Truman would find a home in today’s modern “Democrat Party.”

Just to buttress what you have said, Ms. BWR, the Confederacy was born in the South, and in Charleston in particular. But today, you will not find a more integrated state than South Carolina, nor a more integrated city than Charleston.

The only thing that I disagree with you about, and that only to a limited amount, is how blacks reacted to Confederate monuments. I speak from the standpoint of having attended The Citadel, a college whose students fired the first cannonade of the Civil War. The institution itself is a living monument to the confederacy. It’s fight song is I Wish I Was In Dixie. It was also, by the 80’s, completely and harmoniously integrated. I never once saw the slightest hint of racism, nor any problem with race relations on that campus.

To the extent that there were still symbols of the confederacy in the South, at least by the 1980’s, they were treated as a part of cultural heritage, not as symbols of desire for a return to the days of slavery. They are not being used as a symbol to oppress blacks. The people shouting the loudest for them to be stripped today were not the people, white or black, living in the South. Those doing the shouting were, for the most part, progs from outside of the South who wish to wipe the canvas of history clean so that they can rewrite it to fit the dark fantasy of their narrative today.

ymarsakar

Goldwater correctly noted that federal micromanagement of Southern estates and schools wasn’t going to work and it was unConstitutional.

However, this was a planned operation by the South, since they controlled education, politics, economy, and religion, the Slave Lords still had quite a bit of power. They did not Die in the US Civil War 1 mostly because NONE OF THEM FOUGHT IN IT. And Sherman didn’t do us the favor of killing all of them when they had the chance. And Lincoln was only killed AFTER THE CONFEDERATE generals were amnestied, not a coincidence.

The slave lords planned to make themselves so recalcitrant that the feds had to do something about it. They had correctly learned from their first mistake, when they tried to use the federal power play to force abolitionist states like New York to enforce Federal Law. That didn’t work out so well for them. Now they were forcing Republicans to use the Confed tactic, which causes problems.

Yili Bai

The problem with proclaiming South Carolina as a model of integration is it produced Dylann Storm Roof, a racist murderer who opened fire in a church that was home to a black congregation in Charleston.

Wolf Howling

I am well aware of Dylann Roof. The fact that there was a nut in SC is not surprising, there are such insane people all over. But, if SC produced Roof, how then to explain how SC and Charleston reacted to the horrible incident. The town came together. There was no rioting, despite the best efforts of BLM to agitate for it — and they came to Charleston within a day of the incident. Indeed, I was immensely proud of how the city reacted. So do the people of Charleston and SC get credit for “producing” that?

Yili Bai

Those he took aim at forgave him. They are true Christians.

From the Southern Poverty Center for Law: The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case,” Roof would write in his 2,500-word manifesto. Martin, a black 17-year-old, was fatally shot in 2012 in Sanford, Fla., by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. “It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right,” Roof concluded. “But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words ‘black on white crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day.”

While the case whetted his appetite with misleading stories of a black-on-white crime epidemic, Roof quickly found hate web sites and postings underscoring his radicalized views that whites are the forgotten majority, in jeopardy because of immigrants, often victimized and overlooked by the media and government leaders.

Wolf Howling

Spare me. The Southern Poverty Law Center? Really? What a pile of pure and utter horse shit.

Regardless, do note that according to what you have just written, Roof was a self radicalized nut who did not take his animus from the community, but from the internet. Kind of undermines your implied argument that a racist SC “produced” Root, does it not?

As to “black on white” crime, that is a huge problem, but equally huge is black on black crime. There is a reason the Obama administration eventually had the FBI stop keeping crime statistics by race, at least for all violent crimes other than murder. In 2011, blacks made up 13% of the population. Yet according to FBI Crime Statistics, in not a single category of crime – with the exception of DUI – was the number of total criminal incidents committed by blacks equal to or below their proportionate representation in society. In 2011, blacks in the U.S. were responsible for 49.7% of all murders, 55.6% of all robberies, 32.9% of all forcible rapes, and 33.9% of all aggravated assaults. The FBI does not publish – or at least I could not find – like statistics for victims, but looking at the numbers, blacks were just as likely to be the victims of crime out of all proportion to their representation in society. In 2011, 49.9% of all murder victims were black.

It is a problem that must be admitted and addressed, along with single mothers and a failed education system. Rightly or wrongly, burying the crime problem will only sprout more Roofs over time.

Wolf Howling

I neglected to mention your explanation as to the lack of rioting by those he took aim — that they forgave Root. You are correct, they were true Christians. There were probably about fifty or sixty people in the Church that night who were directly involved. All of them are true Christians.

What about the other 140k people who live in Charleston, 35,000 of whom are black? Certainly the BLM movement that descended on the town and tried to agitate a race riot did not forgive Roof.

There is a much stronger sense of community in Charleston. Racist caricatures of the south painted by progressives serve a narrative purpose, but they do not describe reality as it exists today. It may be that race relations tend to be better in the south today because there is such a strong military and retired military presence there. There is no more well integrated institution in America than the military. That is I am sure one explanation, but far from the only contributing fact.

ymarsakar

The Baltimore riots were also started by out of city Soros clone funded BLM guys. Even the Oathkeeper militia set up sniper posts on roof tops to protect citizen merchants. And civilians in the town, barricaded themselves in a line, protecting the LEOs. Which is ironic, since the LEOs are said to have the power to execute those of that Disobey their Orders, but then they end up being protected by the sheep. That sounds like a natural hierarchy.. not.

Yili Bai

When I was in high school one of the speakers who was brought in was a black veteran. He spoke of the doubts he felt fighting in World War II and being subjected to Japanese propaganda asking why any black would take up arms in defense of a country where he endured segregation. Separate but equal was anything but.

Fast forward to the present: Black Lives Matter is primarily focused on law enforcement killings of black men. In Charleston a police officer pleaded guilty to fatally shooting an unarmed black man in the back in 2015. If the legal system is perceived as treating people of color fairly, there’s no need to take to the streets.

Wolf Howling

Yili, I spent a good part of my life in the military as an infantry officer, and before that, at military college. Probably a third of my soldiers, my fellow officers and my senior officers at any one time were black. They were also all volunteers. They were treated with color blind equality and they, for their part, extended the same to all others. Neither racism nor reverse racism was nor would have been tolerated for a moment. When I left the military, it was a fully and completely integrated institution. As was The Citadel for that matter.

But in your first paragraph, you are not talking about the post 1960 period up through today. You are talking about history before that. Why? You gloss over modern reality as if it didn’t happen to “fast forward” to BLM. And when you get to BLM, you speak of “perception,” not reality.

I will grant you that there is a huge gap today between perception and reality. It exists for a reason. In the absence of actual racism, the progressive left has adopted the ridiculous canard that racism is permanently built into every molecule of every system. Mirable dictu, the entire country is guilty of “color blind” racism. Moreover, they have redefined racism from the objective — an act taken by a person predicated on that person’s belief that another is inferior by virtue of their race, — to the subjective. An action taken without any racial animus is de facto proof of racism if the person being acted upon claims it to be racist.

I have no doubt why that “perception” exists. It is all about money and power. BLM does not exist because of the reality of blacks being killed by police officers, which all in all is an incredibly small number – and happens, percentage wise and adjusted for demographics, less than it happens with whites. It exists because of the progressive left’s need to create the perception that when such a death happens, it happens because of racial animus. BLM started with “hands up don’t shoot.”

The progressive left needs to maintain blacks and women as permanent victims. Marx’s entire schtick was the incredibly myopic claim that the world could be divided into two socio-economic groups, the oppressed and the oppressors. The progressive left in this country has grafted race and gender into that dark fantasy. But while Marx hypothesized that the class war that defined all of history would end with the victory of oppressed and the introduction of pure socio-economic equality, the progressive left has not thought through the end point of the their own brand of Marxism. That end point, in this country where there is no one dominant nationality (and for the love of God, don’t say “white,” for there are more different “white” nationalities in this nation than there are any other, many of whom were historic enemies before coming to these shores), then the end result is balkanization and the end of the American experiment.

And here is the truly sad part, Yili. While about 40% of the black population has moved firmly into the middle (a lot of them through the military) and upper class, 60% have not. And indeed, many of that 60% are stuck in cyclic, systemic poverty marked by single parent families, violent crime many times that of any other identifiable group, and horrendously poor education. In this country, the richest on earth, that is obscene. If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing in this country, that would be it.

The progressive left simply does not want to address the reality that the problems of that lower 60% of black society today are not caused by systemic and permanent racism. Indeed, the progressives can’t address that reality, for it means the end of their Marxist fantasy, and with it, the end of their money and power. So when you say BLM exists “because of a perception,” you are wrong. They exist because of a need to create a perception.

The biggest losers in all of that are that 60% of blacks, suffering in systemic and cyclical poverty. They are not being addressed beyond being used as props by the progressive left — and may all progs roast in hell for that. I certainly don’t have all the answers. I wish that I did. But I am certain that until the progressive left stops yelling “racism” every time someone tries to start a rational discussion on any issue remotely tied to the plight of blacks, the situation will remain unchanged.

ymarsakar

Haha, the Japanese figured that blacks, being ultimately inferior sexual machines designed to breed, would fall for that one.

The Japanese and Chinese have their own version of racism, and it was never as weak as Washington, Jefferson, or Abraham Lincoln’s version.

ymarsakar

SPLC has gotten more people killed than all of BLM and Roof combined.

Dusquene Whistler

“…they were people of immense dignity, led by a man of God…” Yeah, I’m gonna have to stop you right there. MLK did not believe in the virgin birth, the resurrection or the deity of Christ. So which god was he a man of?

ymarsakar

malcom x’s religion was far easier to study, since his conversion out of Islam is why the Nation of Islam killed him.

MLK was probably killed because he began questioning Democrat liberalism and theology at a certain point. They didn’t give him time to make up his mind and tell his followers what was really going on with LBJ and company.

Many Americans believe that priests and “reverends” that graduate with sheepskins, have obtained priestly authority. Once you break that Dusquene, you break much of the “Christianity” in the state religions and in the cultural movements. Then the Christians will deny your Christianity and call you a Satan Worshipper, I predict.

When I was in high school in a northern city, discussions about racism invariably focused on the South. One day a black classmate commented, “I have lived in the South as well as Philadelphia. I can tell you, in the South if white people don’t like me because I’m black they are very upfront about it. None of this, ‘We love you but don’t move in next door stuff.'” Though the term hadn’t been invented, she was referring to political correctness. She felt the former was easier to deal with.

In the South, blacks and whites lived in close proximity but didn’t mix. Everything was separate and blacks understood the consequences of crossing the color line. In 1948 President Harry Truman, a Democrat, proposed full integration of the US military. In response, a contingent of Southern Democrats splintered off into a pro-segregation party known as the Dixiecrats. Strom Thurmond, running as a States Rights Democratic Party candidate while still nominally a Democrat, carried four Southern states in that year’s presidential election. (Strom Thurmond, who became a Republican and remained an ardent segregationist, was revealed posthumously to have fathered a child with a teenage black housekeeper when he was a young man. The child was sent to live with maternal relatives in the North and never publicly acknowledged as his daughter though he paid her college tuition.) States’ rights dovetailed into “small government” espoused by the GOP.

Wolf Howling

You were doing fine until you wrote that Strom Thurmond remained an ardent segregationist. At what point, post 1970, when Thurmond hired the first black Chief of Staff in the Senate, can you find anything that he did that supported segregation? And that bit about him fathering a child with a black housekeeper as a young man (which would have been in the 1920’s or 1930’s) . . . what does that have to do with anything.

Thurmond in fact was the one former southern Dem congresscritter who became a Republican as I recall. In doing so, he joined the party of Eisenhower, the same one that pushed the Civil Rights Law of 58 and that used the military to end segregation in Little Rock after a Republican Supreme Court Justice wrote the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. And indeed, the same party that, in terms of percentage, had voted far more strongly in support of the 64 Civil Rights Act. You know who is a member of that party today, Tim Scott, the only black Senator since what, reconstruction I believe, and Niki Haley, the Indian former Gov., and Lindsey, who is a product of don’t ask, don’t tell. And guess what — all in SC. How about that?

As to your statement that “In the South, blacks and whites lived in close proximity but didn’t mix,” I assume that is a historical statement of life pre-1960 and not based on an ounce of personal observation.

Zachriel

Wolf Howling: You were doing fine until you wrote that Strom Thurmond remained an ardent segregationist.

Thurmond may have moderated his views, but never repudiated his segregationist past.

Wolf Howling

Spare me. The question was “At what point, post 1970, when Thurmond hired the first black Chief of Staff in the Senate, can you find anything that he did that supported segregation?” Answer, nothing.

So Thurmond’s crime was that he didn’t virtue signal?

Zachriel

The man stirred the worst racist impulses in people. When someone does something that wrong, yes, they should admit to the error and make amends. Even George Wallace admitted his error.

Wolf Howling

What is more important, actions or words? I ask in part because I find nothing more racist or discriminatory than the color centric, gender centric, ethno-centric politics of today’s progressive left. And as far as stirring the “worst racist impulses” in people, have you been paying attention at all to the BLM or the many professors teaching the most vile reverse racism or anti-male screed imaginable?

My suspicion is that, by 1970, Thurmond understood that he had lost and gave up on race as an issue, irrespective of his private beliefs, and was simply not hypocrite enough to say otherwise. I doubt he ever stopped being a racist of the 1920’s Democrat style in his heart of hearts, just as I suspect the same of the Grand Kleegle, Robert Byrd, Harry Truman and many others. And I know damn well that neither Woodrow Wilson nor the scourge of blacks to this day, Margaret Sanger, ever gave up their heartfelt racist beliefs.

All of that said, the world would be a much better place today if the post 1970 Strom Thurmond and Harry Truman were still around and in power. The pendulum swing for equality of opportunity and an end to discrimination reached its moral apex under MLK Jr., and the “actions” of both post 70 Thurmond and Harry Truman furthered the mission of MLK Jr. And most of American whites agreed as well. What they did not agree to was the obscenity the progressive left has since turned the civil rights movement into after they captured it in the late 60’s.

For my part, I could care less about apologies from the progs. I care deeply about their future actions though.

When progressives learned of Strom Thurmond’s secret daughter, it crystallized a lot about the gendered hierarchy in the old South. Strom Thurmond, as a 22-year old, knocked up a 16-year old black girl employed by his family. There was no age of consent in effect in those days but it didn’t stop progs from wondering to what degree this was a consensual encounter from the perspective of the maid. While he did support their child and keep in touch with her as an adult, he made it clear she was never to “come out” on the public stage as his daughter. His other children were never made aware of her existence. She came forward only upon his death in 2003, “after she had spent more than 70 years being denied what we all deserve – her true name and birthright. ‘In a way, my life began at 78, at least my life as who I really was,’ Washington-Williams wrote in her life story.” (WaPo)

Wolf Howling

I agree with all that you have said as to his daughter. That still has nothing to do with whether, post 1970, he pursued the policies of an “ardent segregationist.”

Yili Bai

I think the NYT’s summed up his motivation well: “Strom Thurmond’s] opposition to integration, which he often attributed to Communism, was the hallmark of his career in Washington until the 1970’s. In 1971, he was among the first Southern senators to hire a black aide — in recognition of increased black voting resulting from the [Civil Rights] legislation he had fought. From then on, black South Carolinians, like all other residents, benefited from his skills as a pork-barrel politician who took care of the home folks.”

ymarsakar

The US military was already integrated on several levels, Truman was forced to sign something that was De Facto already in the US military operating.

Dixiecrats are the slave lord propaganda. It’s clearly untrue, because of one person: Robert Kkk Byrd.

It is far more likely that Thurmond no longer had the support of the KKK in suppressing Republican votes, so he might as well become Republican and get those votes. Had little to do with the Dixiecrats though, since every Democrat in the South was “pro segregation”.

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